


Sleep and I Shall Soothe You

by Storycat9



Category: Damien (TV), Lucifer (TV)
Genre: Angst and Humor, Angst and Hurt/Comfort, Antichrist Damien Thorn, Damien Thorn Needs a Hug, Established Chloe Decker/Lucifer Morningstar, Everybody loves Trixie Espinoza, Family Feels, Infernal Brady Bunch, It's Astolat's World i Just Play In It, No beta at 2 a.m., Protective Chloe Decker
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-31
Updated: 2020-12-31
Packaged: 2021-03-11 01:26:46
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,474
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28446873
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Storycat9/pseuds/Storycat9
Summary: Like his father, Damien Thorn trusts Chloe Decker’s affection more because she so disliked him on their first meeting.On his good days Damien looks to Chloe like a freshman home from college. On his bad days, like today, she sees a kidnapped kid rescued from somebody’s basement. Like she’s watching a replay of everything that put the flinching self-hatred in Lucifer.
Relationships: Chloe Decker/Lucifer Morningstar, Damien Thorn & Chloe Decker, Damien Thorn & Trixie Espinoza (Lucifer TV), Trixie Espinoza & Lucifer Morningstar
Comments: 11
Kudos: 67





	Sleep and I Shall Soothe You

**Author's Note:**

  * For [astolat](https://archiveofourown.org/users/astolat/gifts).
  * Inspired by [Whosoever Believeth](https://archiveofourown.org/works/6689257) by [astolat](https://archiveofourown.org/users/astolat/pseuds/astolat). 



> This takes place in astolat's awesome insane Lucifer/Damien series Only Begotten. Please note that you should read that first, because this would take place after the events in the second part of the series and I don’t want to spoil it for you. I have never seen such a great blend of superdark, gonzo WTF and heart-tugging fluff.

_“Mommy, Damien, we’re ho-oome!” Trixie sing-songs as she swings through the door ahead of Lucifer, obviously still riding a sugar high. Chloe cuts off singing and waves a frantic mom-wave over her shoulder, putting an exaggerated finger to her lips._

_“Hey Monkey, shh, Damien’s sleeping,” she cautions sotto voce as her daughter and partner come into the living room. Trixie grins at the tousled, slightly sweaty golden head slumped against her hip._

_“Is he feeling better, Mommy?”_

_Lucifer looks down with hospital-waiting-room eyes and reaches out to lay a feather-light hand against his son’s hair. But the expression he lifts to her is puzzled._

* * *

Like his father, Damien Thorn trusts Chloe Decker’s affection more because she so disliked him on their first meeting.

Granted, she’d thought he was a serial killer when they first met. Then, after he was cleared of all charges, she’d still hated the thought that he was incestuously shagging her partner and love interest umpteen times a day (which, to be fair, he had been, but there were celestial bullshit life-and-death _reasons_ for it, so Damien thinks he should get a pass.) But as soon as _that_ tapered off and Detective Decker and Lucifer had sorted out their own popcorn-worthy drama of a relationship, she and Damien settled into a groove.

He gets a kick out of the dry way she punctuates his dad’s over-the-top displays of affection. Lucifer drags him out for a day-long session of bespoke suit tailoring; Chloe quietly brings over comfy hoodies, flannel PJs, soft cotton t-shirts in colors that bring out his eyes. Lucifer buys him a private beach house with a gourmet kitchen; Chloe and Trixie show up with a microwave and toaster oven, about the only things he can actually cook with. 

Detective Decker also tends to shrug at his whole Antichrist thing now. Considering her pre-existing social circle, Damien figures he never really had a chance to be the biggest fish in her very crowded celestial pond. Instead, Damien has been firmly moved into the Detective’s mental file marked “family.” Crazier yet, considering he’s only seven or eight years younger than Detective Decker and half as human, Damien suspects Chloe has filed him under the same label as _Trixie_ : someone innocent, vulnerable, in need of protection. 

He’d been planning to complain to Lucifer about the Detective’s protective streak until the time a 300-pound drunk asshole had pulled a knife outside of Lux, and Damien watched Detective Decker _step in front of the King of Hell_ , pull her gun and force the guy to stand down.

She’d touched his Dad’s chest afterward, lightly, as though reassuring herself that he was safe. Lucifer had covered her hand with his own and quirked a far-too-soft smile at her.

“Chloe, why didn’t you just let Lucifer handle that guy?” Damien had hissed at her indignantly as a couple of patrol officers wrestled the drunk into a car. 

The Detective had gaped at him. “Your dad is a _civilian_ , Damien. It’s not his job here to arrest thugs on street corners … and besides …” 

She’d cut a glance at the other people around, then caught Lucifer’s eye and tilted her head to pull him over. “Lucifer, have you talked to Damien about your whole …” her voice dropped to a whisper, “ _mortality situation_?”

Lucifer had made generally soothing noises to both of them and pulled his son back up to the penthouse for a drink. Damien started to freak out a little at the notion that Detective Decker made his father killable, but Lucifer stilled him with a snifter of brandy and a pensive smile. 

“Do you believe that bloated toad could have done me any real damage?” Lucifer asked, amused.

“Not unless he’d surprised you somehow,” Damien admitted, “but if he couldn’t, isn’t that even more reason to keep Detective Decker out of it? She’s human.” He thought bitterly of his lost girlfriend Kelly.

“The Detective may surprise you; she’s quite a bit stronger and cleverer than other humans I’ve known,” Lucifer said. “And knowing one has a partner, that one is … protected …”

The Devil’s wry smile turned soft. “She reminds me that I am retired, and plan to stay that way. I have found it worth the occasional surprise stabbing or bullet wound.” He cleared his throat abruptly and turned back to the bar. “More brandy?”

Damien could understand what Lucifer was saying. He remembered Lucifer’s hand on the back of his neck in New York, saying Damien deserved to live and didn’t have to destroy the world … swearing that he would be _protected_ and _never abandoned_ … Damien had felt he would do anything for Lucifer, anything at all, on the strength of that promise.

And on the heels of that understanding came another. 

He’d already known that Lucifer was far past _gone_ for Detective Decker, past _fucked_ , and well into Trixie’s Disney-fluff head-over-heels territory. And sure, she was beautiful, she was smart, but she was also often grumpy and exhausted and seemed to share absolutely no common ground with Lucifer’s lifestyle aside from work. So until then he hadn’t put together what made his father love the woman with such singular devotion. 

Damien had never known Lucifer _before_ Chloe Decker, but he thought there must have been a moment when the Detective had put her hand on the Devil’s in kindness, had stepped in front of him with all her ferocious protectiveness, and his father had decided he would move heaven and hell before he gave up the safety of her smile.

* * *

It’s with a surreal but solidifying sense of normalcy that Damien now spends two or three nights a week over with the Decker girls. Through trial and error they’ve found that he can drain off enough of his power in a few hours of concentrated focus to avoid inciting mass violence or spontaneous orgies for a good two days, and after that he’s fine to hang out in Lux a while, with Lucifer’s power to buffer his own. 

He picks up Trixie and helps her with homework until her mom comes home, and then unleashes his infernal Will harmlessly over Chloe while she makes dinner and puts Trix to bed. Often by the time Chloe’s sung her daughter to sleep, Damien’s worked out all his excess power, and they’ll chat about her work or his photography or cheesy science fiction movies until Lucifer or Maze come to pick him up.

Tonight though, he cuts it too close. 

Maze drops him off to babysit so that Chloe and Lucifer can have a “date dinner” after work. It’s been more than three days away, and he’s been feeling itchy in his skin for hours. A fight had broken out in the entrance line at Lux while he’d waited to be picked up; one formerly cheerful club-girl nearly clawed another’s eyes out in front of him.

He and Trix binge “My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic,” and he finds himself getting competitive rather than teasing while debating the merits of Rainbow Dash versus Pinkie Pie. But Trixie is used to arguing with Maze, and gives as good as she gets. It helps, somehow, that she isn’t cowed by him. He lets her order pizza, and they snuggle up after dinner to watch the MLP movie. She curls up and falls asleep like a cat on his lap, and he tips his head back against the sofa and closes his eyes, working on a migraine.

Damien doesn’t feel himself doze off, but he wakes up to a wave of heat and rage flaring in his head. His nerves burn all the way to the tips of his fingers and toes. He looks down to see, not Chloe’s daughter, but his mortal enemy, with her slender throat lying right under his hand. 

His chest heaves with the effort not to strangle her, to snap her neck, to beat her brain into pink and grey pulp. The winds and voices of Hell _roar_ in his ears, demanding blood. He sees it slick his hands like candy-apple gloves and tells himself it’s not real, even as he knows it could be, it could be.

Damien presses the nape of Trixie’s neck once with a trembling hand and the little girl opens her eyes, meets his own with a gaze as dark and deep as Lucifer’s. She sits up in his lap, wraps her arms around his neck and hugs him as tightly as only a 10-year-old girl can. He struggles to see her as she is, alive, not a horror show covered in blood and bone. 

“It’s ok,” she whispers in his ear. “I won’t let anybody hurt you.”

The wind roars. Tumblers turn and fall in the locks of the Antichrist’s heart, and he knows he would bare his chest for all seven daggers of Megiddo and Azrael’s blade besides before he lets himself or anyone else hurt a hair on her head. 

_My sister’s head. My little sister, please, somebody help me._

He holds on, breathes in her slightly grimy little-girl smell and texts his father one-handed. 

_Sorry, pls come back early? Need Chloe, cn u take Trix for ice cream?_

_Of course_ , comes the immediate response. He can always hear texts in his father’s rich British accent, like black velvet brushed along his cheek. _Take a few deep breaths, as Dr. Linda would say, and we’ll be there in a jiff._

Damien isn’t sure what Lucifer tells Chloe on the way home, but she doesn’t snatch her child out of the jaws of the Beast as soon as she hits the door. In fact, she lays a gentle hand on his arm until he forces himself to meet her eyes, and says softly, “Having a Monday on a Thursday, huh? Let me get Trix and Lucifer set up and I’ll be back in a minute.”

Lucifer can see in a glance what had happened, what had nearly happened, and father and son look at each other in mute, helpless misery for a moment. Then Lucifer sits down next to him on the sofa, one hand on the back of Damien’s neck, their eyes closed and foreheads pressed together. They both listen to the Decker girls’ kitchen negotiations over scoops of ice cream and how many chapters of _Coraline_ Chloe promises Lucifer will read at bedtime. 

“She just totally threw you under the bus,” Damien observes with a watery smile.

“Worth it,” his father croaks.

Once Lucifer and Trixie leave, Chloe pours two glasses of wine, hands him one and then flops ungracefully next to him on the couch. “You wanna talk about it?” she asked.

Damien shakes his head, unable to even look at her.

She squeezes his hand. “No worries. Just remember it’s always ok to ask for help if things are getting rough. Trix and I understand better than anybody.” 

She heaves a sigh, picks up a half-read pulp mystery from the coffee table and bumps his leg with her knee, “Push over and let me have the arm, would you? Then you can go ahead and do your world domination mojo thing.”

He switches seats with her, but a wave of incredulity washes over him as Chloe turns to her book. He had nearly beaten her daughter to death in his lap and she sits there like he … like he’s a kid who wanted to cuddle up with Mom to do homework? This woman who turned the most licentious, calculating archangel of all Creation into a doe-eyed, twitterpated mess, who gets a little hesitant talking to Damien about R-rated movies even after she’d walked in on him halfway through the dirtiest orgasm of his life …

The wind, the roaring darkness surges up in him, stronger than it’s been in months, stronger than it’s been since his worst moments of despair in prison, and even knowing he may be breaking his own and his father’s hearts he shoves all of it, all of the power and dominion and rage over and into Chloe Decker. He silently curses himself and humanity and his horrible, horrible, endlessly conniving Grandfather. Abyssal cold floods up from him to her as he metaphysically rants and raves, dredging every drop of his exponentially growing power to impose his Will on the slight blonde woman.

 **_Chloe … Chloe Decker, look at me_ **, he says in a mental voice that thrums with seven voices at once, that demands her obedience and devotion with all the authority of the Prince of the Earth, Son of the Morning. Blood hazes his vision. He scrapes out every flicker of rage scattered across his whole broken, tainted soul and funnels it into Chloe so hard her eyes should roll back in her head, she should have already ripped her clothes off and be halfway through ripping her skin off, too. 

He pushes and pushes for what feels like hours, until there’s nothing left in him. He feels light and dazed, like a fever has broken, like he’s at the end of a monster bout of food poisoning. He realizes he’s holding his breath and lets it out in a shaky little huff.

Chloe idly glances up. “Hmm?”

He clears his throat. “You didn’t feel any …?” 

She smiles and shakes her head. “Still nothing, sorry. But hopefully you’re feeling better?”

Damien says nothing, but shivers a little. Concern flickers over her face before she smooths it away and tugs his sleeve down until Damien finds himself lying with his head on her hip. She looks for a long moment as though she wants to say something, but then sighs and picks up her book again, the fingers of her left hand idly soothing his hair from his forehead between turning the pages. She starts to hum a lullaby he’s heard her sing to Trixie, but he can’t bring the words to mind.

He lies quiet, gratefully no longer filled with murderous dominating rage but feeling self-loathing ooze into the emptiness left behind. Mothersisterfather offering him a family, and he had been a breath away from ripping it apart just to dance in the blood. 

Damien finally catches Chloe’s hand in his hair and holds it still, looking up at her. “Chloe, I wanted to hurt Trixie,” he rasps through the broken glass in his throat. 

She rests her book on the arm of the sofa, turns toward him a little but keeps her hand in his hair so he curls into her arm as he faces her. She touches his chest lightly with the fingertips of her other hand. “You didn’t, Damien. You didn’t hurt her and you didn’t want to.”

“I _did_. We both fell asleep and I woke up and the power was just bursting to get out of me. …” 

She looks at him for a long moment, weighing her words. 

“Trixie told me she fell asleep in your lap, and you woke her up when you had a nightmare--but she hugged you and you felt better,” Chloe says finally. “I think that’s right. You’re still new--we’re all still new at this, and I think we let you go too long without blowing off some steam, or, you know, whatever it is you need to do.”

He coughs out some pathetic sound that doesn’t know whether it wants to be a laugh or a sob. “And how do you know next time I need to blow off steam I won’t slit your daughter’s throat?”

Perhaps the Detective Decker who had not yet had to accept a partner who drives men mad and chases suspects into Hell for antidotes would have flinched at this. Chloe does not. She gives him a look that is both serious and a little terrifying.

“I know because you are Lucifer’s son,” Chloe says. “You are both good, all the way down to the core, and even when horrible things surround you and you have to do equally horrible things to survive, you hold on to that core of yourself. I trust that. … And you know, Trix is an excellent judge of character. She just knows who people are, the first time she meets them. And she took to you just as fast as she took to your Dad.” 

She quirks a smile. “Trixie told me I should sing you her favorite ‘had a bad day’ lullaby.”

Damien tries to smile back, but thinks of his Father standing before him in the penthouse at Lux with his hand on Damien’s head and utter horror and defeat in his eyes. _I can slay the child_ , Lucifer had offered--which almost certainly would have meant killing the woman he loved, too--to protect his son. 

Chloe takes in Damien's lost expression and cups his face in both hands, a tiny but nearly incandescent fury sparking sulfur-blue flame in her own gaze. “Damien, we beat that Bastard by living our lives, and loving each other, and shoving our free will _down His fucking throat_. … Don’t ever let them make you believe you are a monster. You aren’t, and you never will be. You had a nightmare, and that’s it.”

Damien squeezes his eyes closed on tears that threaten, and turns so his head rests on Chloe’s hip again, facing the television. “It was a bad nightmare,” he agrees. 

Chloe hums ... and apropos of nothing asks, “Hey, do you know anything about show tunes?”

That surprises Damien enough to make him laugh for real. “Not a damn thing.”

Then her blue eyes twinkle with some internal joke. “Every lullaby my own Mom ever sang me came from either a classic movie or a Broadway show. Want me to sing you Trixie’s lullaby?”

Damien refused Lucifer’s offer to kill Trixie back then, mostly because he couldn’t bear to hurt his father. But the refusal bought him the means to keep his power at bay long enough to learn to control it, to try for something like a normal life. Damien has chosen again tonight, and Trixie and Chloe and his Dad have chosen too, to keep him. He has no idea where all those choices go, which one might somehow save them. “Sure, can’t hurt,” he says. 

Chloe smiles. She starts to sing, in a not particularly striking but still somehow soothing voice, as her hand returns to his hair:

_Try not to get worried, try not to turn onto problems that upset you_

_Oh, don’t you know everything’s alright? Yes, everything’s fine_

_And we want you to sleep well tonight ..._

* * *

“Detective, are you pulling songs from ‘Jesus Christ, Superstar’ to put _my son_ to sleep?” Lucifer whisper-squawks, half-indignant and half-amused.

“It worked, didn’t it?” Chloe deadpans. “If it’s good enough to get two generations of Deckers to sleep, it’s good enough for the Antichrist.”

“Is he feeling better, Mommy?” Trixie asks, while Lucifer looks between his sleeping son and his girlfriend with a bemused expression.

“He had a bad time, Trixie-babe, but I think he’ll feel better in the morning. We just need to give him extra hugs if he needs them.”

“After washing your hands, Spawn,” Lucifer cuts in dryly. 

Chloe deliberately reaches for Lucifer’s hand and squeezes, letting him know the danger is past, or past enough for tonight anyway. She can see the little tremor that runs through him before he squeezes back, and it hurts her heart how terrified he must have been for the last two hours, not sure what would be left to come home to.

“You can hug him tomorrow, Monkey; just let him be for now. Lucifer can put you to bed and I’ll come kiss you to sleep at the very end.”

“I get two chapters and three songs,” Trixie says as she leads off Lucifer, who puts on a long-suffering face. 

Chloe hisses after them, “ _One_ song, you little weasel! Lucifer, that wasn’t our deal, don’t let her con you!”

It works; Lucifer huffs a little laugh at her daughter’s deviousness, and his shoulders soften a little. Chloe listens to the comforting rise and fall of their voices in the other room, smiling to herself at the Devil’s beautiful baritone lulling her daughter to sleep. She sighs, looking at Lucifer’s son in her arms.

On his good days Damien looks to Chloe like a freshman home from college. On his bad days, like today, she sees a kidnapped kid rescued from somebody’s basement. Like she’s watching a replay of everything that put the flinching self-hatred in Lucifer. 

Only he also feels like Trixie to her now, as if they are somehow two sides of the same celestial coin tossed by Lucifer’s fucked-up Father. She thinks of her partner sitting at his bar, maybe the second time they’d met, spinning his Pentecostal coin above his hand. She hopes that she and Lucifer can keep it spinning, just keep both sides up for as long as they can.

**Author's Note:**

> The title and the lullaby in question refer to "Everything's Alright," the song Mary Magdalene sings to Jesus and Judas in JCS. I know from experience that it does work really well as a lullaby. Here's the link, if you want to hear it: https://youtu.be/J30tQxAkvPY


End file.
